Executive Poaches, Institutional Face Offs and a Custody Launch: Last Week in Crypto

Make sure you check out the previous edition here, now let’s go over what happened in crypto last week. In addition to our normal weekly crypto update, we’ve gone ahead and launched a new podcast The Bitcoin Podcast by CCN. Check it out on iTunes and be sure to rate and subscribe!

Price Watch:

Bitcoin rose nearly 7% during the week. The price surged from $6,300 to $6,600 on Monday morning, but dropped back down to $6,500 late on Tuesday night. The price then surged to almost $6,800 on Wednesday (also “Independence Day” in the US). The price failed to break $7,000 on Friday staying around the $6,500 mark before jumping up to $6,800 on Sunday. Despite the failure to hit critical support levels, analysts have remained bullish. Even the bulls seem to be having some doubts with Fundstrat‘s Tom Lee lowering his end of year prediction to $22,000 from $25,000.

Ethereum gained almost 9% after inching up less than 2% last week. Despite the losses, the currency remains up almost 100% since the same period last year. The move comes after a 5% price surge on Sunday. The lack of price movement until now has largely been blamed on a lack of volume.

The entire market cap rose 6% after increasing by about $13 billion last week. The market has remained mostly flat over the past few weeks at the $270 billion mark. Bitcoin dominance has also been increasing all year going from 35% to 42% in just two months.

Expedia Stops Accepting Bitcoin which has led to an exodus of users to other sites. The likely culprit appears to be the new platform rollout of CoinbaseCommerce which also caused Reddit to stop accepting Bitcoin earlier this year. Other sites, such as Cheapair.com have switched to BitPay to avoid further issues with Coinbase. We have a list of other sites accepting cryptocurrency in this post.

Binance donates $1 million towards Japanese Flood Reliefefforts. The flood has already reportedly killed 60 people and 2 million people have been evacuated. Binance has also asked that their partners donate as well. Additionally, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has promised “bonus points” for future listing requests to projects who donate. He further stated that Binance may count donations towards listing fees

Binance expects $1 billion profit in 2018. The exchange only completed its ICO in July of 2017 and now has 10 million registered traders. If the bear market continues, the goal may be unachievable but Binance is certainly on the right track having reported $200 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2018.

Bloomberg and Kraken Face Off over a Bloomberg article accusing Tether of wash trading and claiming that Kraken is manipulating the price. Tether shot back with accusations that Bloomberg’s article was so illogical it must’ve been an attempt to manipulate the price.